RingCentral, the Communications Workhorse

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We previously introduced you to GrandCentral. For some of us, it’s become a great tool for consolidating incoming calls.

But if you’re okay with putting up a few dollars each month, RingCentral takes things to a whole new level. This is a particularly powerful tool for small, local sales teams wanting to consolidate their calls and give the impression of a much larger firm.

Since RingCentral has been around awhile, we’ll spare you the complete list of features. Instead we’re going to mention just a few creative uses for the service.

Want one number to route incoming calls to your sales team? Let’s face it, if you’re a manager needing to monitor customer service quality or track the number of calls your people receive, or if you’ve suffered turnover and need to reign in all the cell phone numbers floating around, this is a nice option. If you’re a solo business developer, you’ve now got a pretty comprehensive way to manage and route your incoming calls to give a big-company feel.

Want to run a focused sales and marketing campaign for your regional sales team? You can setup a RingCentral toll-free or local number, with individual extensions for each salesperson, to run a promotion on a specific product or service, or based on the season. With a dedicated phone number, you can easily track the number of responses to the campaign, and the extensions can be the reps’ cell phone numbers to ensure customers reach them to make a purchase. One note on this: local numbers are not available everywhere, several states are missing from their available list.

Need multiple phones to ring when one extension is dialed? RingCentral comes standard with this feature — good for managing an inside sales team. Incoming callers can even use the traditional dial-by-name directory.

We’ve emphasized the importance of getting faster, on-the-go access to your faxes. This system lets you receive incoming faxes a la eFax and VoiceFaxEmail (whom we’ve spotlighted before), and have them drop into your email inbox, along with your voicemails. Add $5 per month and you can add a dedicated fax number.

We want to be careful not to sound like a commercial here. This isn’t a paid review. But the feature set for $9.99 per month (when you pay annually) is pretty astounding, really. All this and you didn’t buy any hardware.

And a final word of caution: Customers don’t like sitting on hold. They don’t like waiting for problems to be solved. They want answers quickly. Don’t build a communications system to simply “look bigger”, build it to respond faster.